pic: Team 148 - 2011 - Raptor

[JVN]

Originally Posted by Ian Curtis

How do you generate the tooth profiles? Does IFI just have a piece of software that spits it out, do you do it by hand , or is there a handy SW feature that I've missed that does it for you?

There are lots of ways to do this. Some of my favs:

1. Pull out your handy Machinist's Handbook and sketch the tooth profile by hand.

2. Buy one of those gear profile generation programs and get it to spit it out for you.

3. Download the gear from somewhere online. bostongear.com has all their gears available online.

For this year's robot we used option 3. I downloaded the gear I wanted from Boston gear, then traced over the tooth in Solidworks (eliminating splines with simple arcs, so it would import cleaner into our laser cutter's NC program). I grabbed this sketch, dropped it into a new sheetmetal part and away we went...

-John